Common ground, a naturalist's Cape Cod

Robert Finch's selected essays, Common Ground, document one man's impassioned, informed, and inquisitive encounters with the natural world. Finch's locus is Cape Cod, that sandy, scrub-oaked, tough mutable, and vulnerable spit of land reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean like a gesturing arm. In these fine and expansive essays, Finch is witness to the powerful workings of northeaster and ocean, to the shift of dunes and the migration of herring to the flight of a woodcock and the death of a junco. Much more than cut-and-dried conservationism, Finch's naturalism is rooted in a keenly felt and reasoned philosophy of man's life with the land.

This is a book about beginnings, or landfalls, in a place by the sea that has been explored, settled, visited, studied, and written about more than almost any other stretch of the North American coastline. The focus of these essays is a personal response to the changing face of this curved peninsula, keeping in touch with the place where one lives.